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Many theorists believe that the manipulation of voting procedures is a serious problem. Accordingly, much of social choice theory examines the conditions under which strategy-proofness can be ensured, and what kind of procedures do a better job of preventing manipulation. This article argues that democrats should not be worried about manipulation. Two arguments against manipulation are examined: first, the ‘sincerity argument’, according to which manipulation should be rejected because it displays a form of insincere behaviour. This article distinguishes between sincere and non-sincere manipulation and shows that a familiar class of social choice functions is immune to insincere manipulation. Secondly, the ‘transparency’ argument against manipulation is discussed and it is argued that (sincere or insincere) manipulation may indeed lead to non-transparency of the decision-making process, but that, from a democratic perspective, such non-transparency is often a virtue rather than a vice.

Rivalry is characterized by mutual mistrust, anger and fear, and becomes increasingly intractable as confrontations between rivals militarize. The empirical record confirms that rivalries account for the vast number of militarized interstate disputes and wars in the international system. Although considerable attention has been spent on the initiation, duration or termination of rivalries, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework for their persistence or failure exists. Following Fearon, a rationalist explanation of rivalry termination is developed. It is argued here that the adoption of liberal institutions helps alleviate the commitment problems arising in rivalry. Free-market reform, democratic institutions and membership in international organizations all build trust and increase defection costs among rival states, and therefore help to shorten the duration of rivalry. Using a Cox proportional hazard model and Thompson's data on rivalries, it is shown that change towards democracy, as well as the joint effect of democracy and economic development increase the likelihood of rivalry termination. Also, joint membership in international organizations with mechanisms for dispute settlement reduces the duration of rivalry.Arobustness check using Diehl and Goertz's list of rivalries produces similar results.

Acentral puzzle in the comparative politics literature has been why certain societies are able to achieve political stability while others suffer from strife, repression and authoritarian rule. This article applies the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE) to Weingast's Sovereign-Constituency Co-ordination Game in order to show how our understanding of political stability can be enhanced when uncertainty and limited rationality are explicitly modelled. Comparative statics results first confirm the intuitive logic that civil conflict is unlikely when regimes threaten penalties for revolt that are much more severe than current living conditions and when the benefits to a successful revolt are not sufficiently enticing. In addition, our analysis provides a logic for the outbreak of civil conflict, noting that it is most likely when key payoffs are in their intermediate regions and far from critical ‘thresholds’, resulting in ambiguous and counterintuitive decision making by leaders and citizen opposition groups.

Do voters reward or punish incumbents for retrospective performance similarly in different democratic regimes? Despite debates on the merits of different regimes, little research has investigated the implications of constitutional design on voters' ability to hold politicians to account. This article shows that regime type determines the way and extent to which elections enable voters to reward or sanction incumbents. These regime effects are separate from and conceptually prior to factors previously identified in the literature on comparative economic voting. Analysis of elections from seventy-five countries reveals that, all else equal, voters have greater potential to hold incumbents to accounts under the separation of powers than under parliamentarism. Moreover, variables particular to separation of powers systems – the electoral cycle in pure presidential systems and instances of cohabitation in semi-presidential systems – affect the relative impact of the attribution of responsibility. The results contribute to ongoing debates about the relative advantages of different constitutional formats for democratic performance.

A long tradition within political science examines the impact of party canvassing on voter participation. Very little of this work, however, is comparative in scope. This essay examines how system-level characteristics shape the nature and impact of party canvassing and how voters respond to those efforts. Parties are found to target the same types of potential voters everywhere – those who are likely to participate. However, one important difference is that overall levels of party contact are far greater in candidate-based systems than in proportional representation (PR) systems. Party mobilization, therefore, cannot explain the higher rates of turnout observed in PR systems.

Why do new parties continue emerging and attracting votes in new democracies? Does the duration of the democratic regime facilitate party system stabilization? With original data on legislative elections in fifteen East European countries (1990–2004), this article shows that new party entry is more likely when the cost of entry is low, the benefit of office is high and the perceived level of electoral viability is high. Support for new parties is influenced by the extent of disappointment with existing parties. Further, while the number of new parties decreases gradually as democracies age, the support for new entrants follows no clear unidirectional pattern across time.

Traditional explanations of the origins of regional parties as the products of regionally-based social cleavages cannot fully account for the variation in regional party strength both within and across countries. This unexplained variance can be explained, however, by looking at institutions, and in particular, political decentralization. This argument is tested with a statistical analysis of thirty-seven democracies around the world from 1945 to 2002. The analysis shows that political decentralization increases the strength of regional parties in national legislatures, independent of the strength of regional cleavages, as well as of various features of a country's political system, such as fiscal decentralization, presidentialism, electoral proportionality, cross-regional voting laws and the sequencing of executive and legislative elections.

A widespread turn towards mechanism-centred explanations can be viewed across the social sciences in recent decades. This article clarifies what it might mean in practical terms to adopt a mechanismic view of causation. This simple task of definition turns out to be considerably more difficult than it might at first appear. The body of the article elucidates a series of tensions and conflicts within this ambient concept, looking closely at how influential authors have employed this ubiquitous term. It is discovered that ‘mechanism’ has at least nine distinct meanings as the term is used within contemporary social science: (1) the pathway or process by which an effect is produced; (2) an unobservable causal factor; (3) an easy-to-observe causal factor; (4) a context-dependent (bounded) explanation; (5) a universal (or at least highly general) explanation; (6) an explanation that presumes highly contingent phenomena; (7) an explanation built on phenomena that exhibit lawlike regularities; (8) a distinct technique of analysis (based on qualitative, case study, or process-tracing evidence); or (9) a micro-level explanation for a causal phenomenon. Some of these meanings may be combined into coherent definitions; others are obviously contradictory. It is argued, however, that only the first meaning is consistent with all contemporary usages and with contemporary practices within the social sciences; this is therefore proposed as a minimal (core) definition of the concept. The other meanings are regarded as arguments surrounding the core concept.

In multi-party democracies, several parties usually have to join together in coalition to form government. Many aspects of that process have been fairly fully investigated, others less so. Among the latter is the timing of the formation and announcement of coalitions.

While the dominant popular image may be one of parties meeting together after the election to hammer out a coalition agreement, pre-election coalitions of one sort or another are actually quite common. In almost half of the elections in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries since the Second World War, at least one pair of parties had pre-announced their intention to join together in government. A quarter of governments formed were based wholly (and another quarter in part) on pre-election agreements.

To date, such studies as there have been of pre-election coalitions have concentrated primarily on system-level explanations – features of the electoral system (majoritarian or proportional, and so on) that make such arrangements more or less likely.3 Here we shall instead look more at the agent-level logic of ‘early’ (pre-election) versus ‘late’ (post-election) coalition formation, from the point of view of voters and parties.

hypotheses concerning coalition timing

In the tradition of Downs and Riker and their coalition-theorist progeny, we shall assume that voters are interested primarily in getting policies adopted which are close to their ‘ideal points’ in policy space, and that parties are interested primarily in winning office to implement policies as close as possible to their ‘ideal points’ in policy space. That leads parties to strive for ‘minimal connected winning coalitions’: ‘connected’ in the sense that they link parties adjacent in policy space; ‘minimal’ in the sense that they involve the party's sharing power with the fewest parties backed by fewest voters that it can and still win.